In this project-based course, par­tic­i­pants will be chal­lenged to develop solu­tions using tech­nolo­gies such as VR (e.g., Oculus Rift, HTC Vive) and immer­sive multi-modal media instal­la­tions. In addi­tion to focus­ing on the co-construction of dig­i­tal pro­to­types afford­ing mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences in “alter­nate real­i­ties”, our objec­tive is to stim­u­late doc­u­mented reflec­tion and dis­cus­sion through­out the process. Participants can expect to work col­lab­o­ra­tively, be matched accord­ing to the skills they bring, and be pro­vided time and resources to learn new tech­niques and approaches, soft– and hard skills, and processes to con­duct user research. Participants will get the oppor­tu­nity to reflect on future tech­nolo­gies and their poten­tial impact on the world, and improve their pre­sen­ta­tion skills and pub­licly show­case their projects. To incor­po­rate diverse per­spec­tives, stu­dents from dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines are invited to apply and, in their appli­ca­tion, argue how they could con­tribute to the course and the co-construction of team projects(application dead­line: end of October 2018).

To give you an idea what projects might look like, view the VR project videos or this AWE video from pre­vi­ous stu­dent teams in courses that Bernhard and Patrick have taught. There is increas­ing evi­dence that the immer­sive nature of VR makes it a pow­er­ful medium for “doing good,” and it is par­tic­u­larly well-suited for help­ing people develop com­pas­sion and empa­thy. In this course, we will explore the poten­tial of doing good using alter­nate real­i­ties (that are boom­ing around the world and par­tic­u­larly in Vancouver)

My TEDxEastVan talk from September 16th is now finally online! It was enti­tled “Could Virtual Reality Make us More Human” and includes some of our recent research and future direc­tions and exam­ples from my teach­ing on immer­sive envi­ron­ments. Enjoy!

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It was such an honour and amaz­ing expe­ri­ence to present at TEDxEastVan on September 16th! Below are some first pic­tures, the video will be released later in October and will be posted here.

My TEDx talk was titled “Could Virtual Reality Make us More Human” and included some of our recent research and exam­ples from my teach­ing on immer­sive envi­ron­ments. Here’s some of the ideas in a nutshell:

Virtual real­ity is becom­ing increas­ingly acces­si­ble and afford­able, and offers the unique oppor­tu­nity to pro­vide first-hand and embod­ied expe­ri­ences. How could we use this poten­tial to go beyond enter­tain­ment and gaming, for cre­at­ing pos­i­tive or even trans­for­ma­tional expe­ri­ences we might oth­er­wise not be able to have? And how could we democ­ra­tize the medium and put this pow­er­ful tech­nol­ogy into the cre­ative hands of more people?

I’m hon­oured, exciTED (and a bit ner­vous) to have been selected to present at TEDxEastVan on September 16th.

My TEDx talk will be titled “Could Virtual Reality Make us More Human” and will include some of our recent research and exam­ples from my teach­ing on immer­sive envi­ron­ments. Here are some of the ideas I’ll put forth:

Virtual real­ity is becom­ing increas­ingly acces­si­ble and afford­able, and offers the unique oppor­tu­nity to pro­vide first-hand and embod­ied expe­ri­ences. How could we use this poten­tial to go beyond enter­tain­ment and gaming, for cre­at­ing pos­i­tive or even trans­for­ma­tional expe­ri­ences we might oth­er­wise not be able to have? And how could we democ­ra­tize the medium and put this pow­er­ful tech­nol­ogy into the cre­ative hands of more people?

For those who couldn’t make it out to our Virtual Reality — Going Beyond show­case from the IAT 445 “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” course, here are some of the project videos. Thanks to all the stu­dents & TA Alex for all the great work and inspir­ing projects!

Here are some pic­tures and project posters from our Virtual Reality — Going Beyond show­case from the IAT 445 “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” course that I taught with lots of great help from TA & PhD stu­dent Alex Kitson. Project videos will follow soon…

Project posters:

IAT 445 Project showcase on Friday June 23, 2017, 10am-2:30pm

On Friday June 23, 2017, the stu­dents from my course on “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” (IAT 445) will be pre­sent­ing their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus, from about 10am — 2:30pm.

9 stu­dent teams will show­case their own immer­sive Virtual Reality projects that they devel­oped in the pop­u­lar game engine Unity3D and will present using the Oculus Rift head-mounted display.

Some projects draw from con­tem­po­rary indie/art com­puter games like Dear Esther, Journey, or Stanley’s Parable and cinema/television.

Students were tasked to design for a pur­pose­ful and immer­sive user expe­ri­ence — this semester’s design chal­lenge for stu­dents was Going beyond: “Use unity3D and guid­ing frame­works (e.g., immer­sion, pres­ence, user-centered sys­tems design etc.) to iter­a­tively ideate, design, pro­to­type, and eval­u­ate an immer­sive and inter­ac­tive vir­tual envi­ron­ment expe­ri­ence that “goes beyond”: How could you pro­vide inter­est­ing, inspir­ing, or mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences in VR? That is, what expe­ri­ences could you pro­vide in VR that are oth­er­wise dif­fi­cult, dan­ger­ous, or hard to expe­ri­ence? Instead of using VR as only a past-time and ulti­mate sen­sory over­load tool to wow people, how could you use it for some­thing more inter­est­ing, novel, excit­ing, or mean­ing­ful?” Be pre­pared for some excit­ing showcases!

In case you can’t make it to the inter­ac­tive project show­case, you can join the public project video pre­sen­ta­tion ses­sion on Thursday June 29th at 2:30pm, in Surrey room #5380, or wait for the best videos to be posted online.

“We went to the Moon as tech­ni­cians, we returned as human­i­tar­i­ans” reflected Edgar Mitchell after his space flight. This describes the overview effect – a pro­found awe-inspiring expe­ri­ence of seeing Earth from space result­ing in a cog­ni­tive shift, lead­ing to a more con­scious and caring view on our planet. Experiencing Earth from space first-hand made many astro­nauts real­ize that Earth is frag­ile, with­out bor­ders, lead­ing to a feel­ing of con­nect­ed­ness to human­ity and our planet(see astro­nauts’ quotes). Such an aware­ness shift could have a pos­i­tive impact on our soci­ety and planet, espe­cially if we had a tool that allowed for more people to expe­ri­ence it with­out the risk, cost, and envi­ron­men­tal foot­print asso­ci­ated with actual space flight.
To this end, the iSpace Lab inves­ti­gates how we could best use the poten­tial of immer­sive vir­tual real­ity to give people a glimpse of the overview effect with­out having to send more rock­ets to space. At the same time, we use vir­tual real­ity as a tool allow­ing us to better under­stand the expe­ri­ence and under­ly­ing trig­gers of the overview effect phenomenon.

To this end, we will design a set of intro­spec­tive, phys­i­o­log­i­cal and

(1) design a set of intro­spec­tive, phys­i­o­log­i­cal and behav­ioural eval­u­a­tion research tools to better under­stand the overview effect phe­nom­e­non and how immer­sive VR could serve to induce it;

(2) Pilot these research tools as an essen­tial part of our larger research pro­gram through the cre­ation of a VR envi­ron­ment, gain­ing a deeper under­stand­ing of aspects of the per­sonal expe­ri­ences of the OE deliv­ered through VR, and as a result deriv­ing strate­gies for the design of piv­otal VR expe­ri­ences with the long-term goal of induc­ing pos­i­tive social change in the population.

Project showcase on Friday December 9th 2016, 10am-2pm

On Friday December 9th 2016, the stu­dents from my course on “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” (IAT 445) will be pre­sent­ing their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus, from about 10:00am — 2pm.

10 stu­dent teams show­cased their own immer­sive Virtual Reality projects that they devel­oped in the pop­u­lar game engine Unity3D and will present using the Oculus Rift DK2 head-mounted display.

Some projects draw from con­tem­po­rary indie/art com­puter games like Dear Esther, Journey, or Stanley’s Parable and cinema/television. Students were tasked to design for a pur­pose­ful and immer­sive user expe­ri­ence — this semester’s design chal­lenge for stu­dents was evok­ing a strong yet mean­ing­ful feel­ing of empa­thy: ”“Use unity3D and guid­ing frame­works (e.g., immer­sion, pres­ence, user-centered sys­tems design etc.) to iter­a­tively ideate, design, pro­to­type, and eval­u­ate an immer­sive and inter­ac­tive vir­tual envi­ron­ment that evokes empa­thy in a mean­ing­ful way. This could be empa­thy towards humans as well as non-human ani­mals, plants (e.g. trees) or even inan­i­mate nat­ural objects (moun­tains). So be pre­pared for some excit­ing showcases!

In case you can’t make it to the inter­ac­tive project show­case, you can join the public project video pre­sen­ta­tion ses­sion on Thursday December 15th at 4:30pm, in Surrey room #2600 (the large the­atre), or wait for the best videos to be posted online.

The “overview effect” is an aware­ness shift expe­ri­enced by astro­nauts when they see the Earth from space and real­ize how frag­ile it is. This is described as a pro­found effect lead­ing to more con­scious and caring view on our planet. Could we use immer­sive Virtual Reality (and some other tricks) to give people a glimpse of this expe­ri­ence with­out having to spend all the money and fossil fuel to send rock­ets out into space? We’ll post more infos about this project on our Virtual EarthGazing project page soon. Feel free to con­tact us if you’re inter­ested in collaborating.

here’s a nice overview video of the over­all topic (thanks to the plan­e­tary collective)

Here’s a video of my pre­sen­ta­tion at the 2016 International Psychonomics Conference in Granada about an online spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion study and the rather unex­pected response pat­terns that we observed — and how we might be able to make sense of them.

Last year Alex Kitson gave a great pre­sen­ta­tion at the 2nd International Workshop on Movement and Computing (MoCo) in Vancouver, co-located with ISEA.
here’s at last a record­ing and the full ref­er­ence: Kitson, A., Riecke, B. E., & Stepanova, E. R. (2015). (pp. 100–103). Presented at the MOCO’15 – 2nd International Workshop on Movement and Computing, Vancouver, Canada: ACM. doi:10.1145/2790994.2791014
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=279. Enjoy!

Here’s a record­ing of an invited talk I just gave about some aspects of our the­o­ret­i­cal frame­work on spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion and ref­er­ence frame con­flicts.
The talk was enti­tled “Qualitative Modeling of Spatial Orientation Processes and Concurrent Reference Frame Conflicts using Logical Propositions” and pre­sented at the International Workshop on Models and Representations in Spatial Cognition at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, Germany from March 3 – 4, 2016

On Friday June 26th, the stu­dents from the summer 2015 course offer­ing of “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” course (IAT 445) will be pre­sent­ing their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus, from about 10:30am — about 1:30pm.

10 stu­dent teams will show­case their own immer­sive Virtual Reality projects that they devel­oped in the pop­u­lar game engine Unity3D and will present using the Oculus Rift DK2 head-mounted display.

Some projects draw from con­tem­po­rary indie/art com­puter games like Dear Esther, Journey, or 5 nights at Freddy’s and cinema/television. Students were tasked to design for a pur­pose­ful and immer­sive user expe­ri­ence — this semester’s design chal­lenge for stu­dents was evok­ing a strong yet mean­ing­ful emo­tional or vis­ceral response: “Use unity3D and guid­ing frame­works (e.g., immer­sion, pres­ence, user-centered sys­tems design etc.) to iter­a­tively ideate, design, pro­to­type, and eval­u­ate an immer­sive and inter­ac­tive vir­tual envi­ron­ment that evokes a strong yet mean­ing­ful emo­tional or vis­ceral response in the users.” So be pre­pared for some excit­ing showcases!

Cheers & hope to see you there,

Bernhard

P.S> In case you can’t make it to the inter­ac­tive project show­case, you can join the public project video pre­sen­ta­tion ses­sion on Friday July 3rd at 10:30am, in Surrey room #2600 (the large the­atre), or wait for the best videos to be posted online.

Over the last year we’ve been col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Vancouver offices of Perkins + Will, and just fin­ished a project video on it (thanks to the great stu­dents team from IAT334: Linda Nguyen, Danny Blackstock, Jason Chen, and Justin Poon!).

One guid­ing ques­tion for the project was how to best use immer­sive Virtual Reality and embod­ied loco­mo­tion inter­faces to to design more cost– and space-efficient solu­tions for effec­tive pre­sen­ta­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion of archi­tec­tural designs and ideas. Our over­all goal is to iter­a­tively design and eval­u­ate a novel embod­ied VR system that enables users to quickly, intu­itively, and pre­cisely posi­tion their vir­tual view­point in 3D space and nav­i­gate through the space while free­ing up both hands for inter­ac­tion with the envi­ron­ment and more nat­ural com­mu­ni­ca­tion using ges­tures (e.g., with stake­hold­ers and col­leagues during a design review ses­sion). The video describes our work so far (pub­li­ca­tions will follow soon hope­fully… more info at the project page). Enjoy!

On November 26th, the 9 stu­dents in my grad course on “Quantitative Research Methods & Design (IAT802)” that I taught in Fall 2014 gave their final 7-min project pre­sen­ta­tions in the SIAT research col­lo­quium at Simon Fraser University. Enjoy! I think the stu­dents did an amaz­ing job, quite proud of them! — for many it was their first sci­en­tific research project and presentation!

On Friday November 28th, the stu­dents from the “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” course (IAT 445) will be pre­sent­ing their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus, from about 10:30am — about 1:30pm.

Three teams will show­case their own immer­sive Virtual Reality projects that they devel­oped in the pop­u­lar game engine Unity3D and will present using either the Oculus Rift DK2 head-mounted dis­plays or on immer­sive view­ing setups that they designed themselves.

Some projects draw from con­tem­po­rary indie/art com­puter games like Dear Esther and Slender Man and cinema/television. Students were tasked to design for a pur­pose­ful and immer­sive user expe­ri­ence — this semester’s design chal­lenge for stu­dents was evok­ing a strong yet mean­ing­ful emo­tional or vis­ceral response: “Use unity3D and guid­ing frame­works (e.g., immer­sion, pres­ence, user-centered sys­tems design etc.) to iter­a­tively ideate, design, pro­to­type, and eval­u­ate an immer­sive and inter­ac­tive vir­tual envi­ron­ment that evokes a strong yet mean­ing­ful emo­tional or vis­ceral response in the users.” So be pre­pared for some excit­ing showcases!

Cheers

Bernhard

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P.S. In case you can’t make it to the inter­ac­tive project show­case, you can join the public project video pre­sen­ta­tion ses­sion on Tuesday December 2nd at 4:30pm, in Surrey room #2600 (the large theatre).

We just started our first online spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion exper­i­ment — below’s the ad. Enjoy!

Want to help out the Science?! Have 10 min­utes to spare in front of your com­puter? Contribute to the research in spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion in Virtual Reality by taking part in this online exper­i­ment study­ing spa­tial nav­i­ga­tion. The process will involve nav­i­ga­tion tasks fol­lowed by a number of ques­tion­naires.
We are look­ing for par­tic­i­pants with normal or cor­rected to normal vision and an access to a laptop or desk­top com­puter (no smart-phones or tablets please!). If you have any ques­tions or con­cerns please send an e-mail to erstepan@sfu.ca .
Also, par­tic­i­pants can enter in draw to win a PRIZE! http://fluidsurveys.com/surveys/siat-survey/virtual-point-to-origin/